Inside Domino’s Idea To Top Its Pizza Tracker With IFTTT Tech
This week, Domino’s announced that it has now integrated IFTTT into its Pizza Tracker tech, to connect your pizza order to your smart home. So now it can turn on the porch lights when your pizza is out for delivery, or make sure your smart TV has the right game on or fired up Netflix as the pizza arrives. Trivial? Yes. Unnecessary? Of course. Cool? Pretty much.
The pizza chain has long established its tech bonafides, with the Pizza Tracker back in 2008, to now through its Anyware platform, giving us the ability to order pizza through everything from Google Home and Facebook Messenger, to Ford Sync or a pizza emoji.
Kelly McCormick, creative director at Domino’s agency Crispin Porter+Bogusky (CP+B), says that while the brand is always looking for ways to bring new ideas to life, it also wanted to re-examine existing tools, to see how they could be better. That’s when they landed on the Pizza Tracker, which has been giving people the ability to track their pizza order online from preparation to delivery.
“How could we build on it, open it up, make it even more useful?” says McCormick. “That led us to IFTTT, which allows customers to extend the Tracker’s capabilities to real-world objects and environments.”
While it is a bit gimmicky, the IFTTT tool is still something that people can have fun with, which is a consistent value in much of Domino’s innovations across its Anyware platform. How do they evaluate ideas in terms of what people want, what will surprise them, and what’s a realistic project to take on?
“Many times, those three things may, in fact, be at odds,” says McCormick. “What people think they want might actually not surprise them. Sometimes, we believe in making something that people never knew they might want. It’s definitely on an idea-by-idea basis, but we have to weigh desire, cultural trends, timeliness, utility, etc. In terms of what’s realistic, we really, truly believe our collective team defines “realistic” differently from most other brands. We make sure everything we put out there creates a great or better experience for the Domino’s fan when it comes to ordering, getting and enjoying Domino’s pizza.”
McCormick’s fellow CP+B creative director D’Arcy O’Neill says the brand’s focus on innovation is primarily about their experience before getting the pizza in their hands.
“That means reinventing ordering, waiting and delivery,” says O’Neill. “With IFTTT we’re working on creating more of an experience around the pizza, and also invite our customers in a bit closer to help create and define that experience.”
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